Emotional experience of listening to music among Croatian music school students

The experience of listening to music implies the evocation of pleasant and unpleasant emotions in everyday life and music teaching. During music lessons, music can stimulate or regulate students’ emotions, thereby promoting children’s emotional development. This study discusses research conducted in 2024 to determine the emotions evoked by different compositions in music school students and investigate potential differences in emotional experiences based on sex, grade level, and familiarity with the composition. In total, 134 students from primary and secondary music schools in the Republic of Croatia participated in a survey. They listened to eight different compositions for approximately 1 min. For each composition, they noted whether they have heard it before, picked one of four emotions (happiness, sadness, calmness, and anger/anxiety) that they felt the strongest, and rated the strength of that emotion on a scale of 1 – 3. Over half of the participants concurred on the emotions elicited by each composition. There were no statistically significant differences in the expressed emotions among the students based on their sex, grade level, or familiarity. The results reflected high levels of consensus about the emotions evoked by musical pieces between individuals from the same cultural backgrounds and general age groups.